In all the countries of Europe the first impressions with reference to the Jesuits were extremely unfavorable to them, and the most decided among those most conspicuous for devotion to the Church. There was nothing in the life of Loyola to inspire confidence, either in him or in his plan of operations. He was looked upon as an adventurer, who had abandoned a military life only because his person was disfigured by a wound, in order to acquire distinction in some other pursuit. Some of the ecclesiastics--as in the case of Melchior the Dominican--were disposed to rebuke his presumptuousness in assuming sanctity and superiority; while others of them, like the vicar-general at Saragossa and the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, considered his teachings as tending to encourage heresy, not only because of their novelty, but because they blasphemously recognized him and all subsequent superiors of the Jesuits as equal to God in both attributes and power. They could not persuade themselves to believe that Christianity required them to recognize Loyola as infallible, whilst the pope, by the existing faith of the Church, remained fallible. Loyola was thus surrounded with embarrassments which would have subdued the courage of almost any other man. He, however, was rather strengthened than weakened by opposition; for he belonged to that class of men who need the excitement of conflict and the spur of necessity to develop their commanding qualities. He had laid his plans well and skillfully, and, with a perfect knowledge of the condition of society, had prepared to derive power from the only sources recognized as possessing it; that is, from the pope as head of the Church, and monarchs as the possessors of absolute dominion. So long as he could avail himself of their united support, he had little or no fear of the people, whom he could readily resist and humiliate as he had done at Saragossa. He soon realized that he could easily brush opposing ecclesiastics out of his way, so long as he could retain monarchism as the leading and central principle of his society; and hence he directed all his efforts to the suppression of the Reformation, and to the continued union of Church and State, so as to give additional strength to monarchism, upon which, as a reserved force, he could fall back whensoever the interests of his society and the exigencies of his affairs required it. Whilst the bulk of society were unable to penetrate his secret purposes and motives, enough transpired, even during the life of Loyola, to excite general suspicion against his own and the integrity of his society, on which account it was that he encountered such formidable opposition to the introduction of his society into Spain, and its loss of influence and reputation in Portugal, both of which States were eminently devoted to the Roman Catholic religion. In obedience to the general rule, that "the same causes produce the same results," the opposition to Loyola and his